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Tuesday, April 2, 2013

B is for Bully

BULLY

USA, 2011

Running Length:
98 minutes

Cast: Alex,
Ja’Maya, Kelby, David Long, Tina Long, Kirk Smalley

Director:Lee Hirsch

Cinematography: Lee
Hirsch

Kids are bullied in schools every day.Teachers turn a blind eye, unable or
unwilling to get involved or stop it.For some kids, the daily torture becomes too much to bear and they take
their own lives.Or others.

Bully doesn’t
offer any insight into why kids bully one another.It doesn’t offer the bullied any strategic moves to avoid
being bullied. What it does do is put a face to the millions of kids for whom
going to school each day is an ordeal.

Filmed in various American states and towns, Bully follows
several children as they struggle through the school year.There’s sweet, gawky Alex, a middle-schooler
who gets called Fish-Face by his peers and is subjected to painful humiliations
on the bus to school each day.There’s Kelby who came out as a lesbian and now faces harassment and
hatred from her whole small town.And there’s smart, talented Ja’Meya whose daily journey to school became
so traumatic she held a gun on the entire busload of kids and wound up in
juvenile prison.

The adult figures presented here are shown to be ineffectual
or uncaring.They can’t see what
is going on under their noses and if they do see it, they only see a tip of the
iceberg, not the full extent of the problem.When Alex’s parents go to the school to complain about his
treatment on the bus the administrator claims she’s ridden the bus and the kids
are model citizens.No one
challenges her with the fact of course the kids behave when they’re being
watched by an authority figure.It’s when they aren’t being watched the problems arise.

It’s hard not to feel for these kids, and the parents who
speak here about the loss of their kids after the bullying forced them to do
the unthinkable.I had tears in my
eyes when I heard about 11-year-old Ty taking his own life.An 11-year-old shouldn’t even know what
suicide is, let alone feel desperate enough to use it.

But I don’t think this film went far enough.Showing bullying and its consequences
is not enough.Real, practical
solutions for stopping it need to be investigated.And for this to happen, school administrations need to
acknowledge that it is going on.The film makers state they want this film to be used as a tool in
schools, but I can’t see how, without offering anything but portrayals of
bullying, and parental grief, the film has any role to play except in raising
awareness of a problem most kids are already all too aware of.

10 comments:

I've really been meaning to see this movie, but now I'm disappointed that it offers no practical solutions to the problem (what's the point then?). Instead it will probably just make me sad and angry, so I guess we'll see. Thanks for the scoop :)

Sounds like something I need to watch, as a parent and a teacher. Maybe a discussion with kids at the end about how to solve the problem would provide insight and be more powerful for them to come up with their own solutions? (I need to watch the film to decide if that's a viable option). Thanks for sharing.

This just sounds tragic. It's one thing to start to get bullied in high school -- you have just four years and then you're free. But for it to start on kids this young ... it's horrible. I agree that an 11 year-old shouldn't know about suicide, let alone want to use it. It would've been nice if the movie could list some practical solutions.

The saddest part is that bullying is a known problem and has been for a while now. Yet little has changed.

I totally agree. I'm an advocate of cameras in buses, hallways, and campuses. In fact, on every street and in every apartment hallway. if everywhere on earth was watched by a camera, I think 90% of crime would stop. Considering how small cameras can be now and how inexpensive digital recording is, I'm very surprised that they're not utilized by more towns and companies.

About Me

Author of An Unstill Life and STUMPED (releasing 15 December 2017) I am a writer, marketing executive for a national film agency, film reviewer and mother to two boys. As you can imagine, with all that going on, I don't sleep much.